I will tell you what he told me
in the years just after the war
as we then called
the second world war

don’t lose your arrogance yet he said
you can do that when you’re older
lose it too soon and you may
merely replace it with vanity

just one time he suggested
changing the usual order
of the same words in a line of verse
why point out a thing twice

he suggested I pray to the Muse
get down on my knees and pray
right there in the corner and he
said he meant it literally

it was in the days before the beard
and the drink but he was deep
in tides of his own through which he sailed
chin sideways and head tilted like a tacking sloop

he was far older than the dates allowed for
much older than I was he was in his thirties
he snapped down his nose with an accent
I think he had affected in England

as for publishing he advised me
to paper my wall with rejection slips
his lips and the bones of his long fingers trembled
with the vehemence of his views about poetry

he said the great presence
that permitted everything and transmuted it
in poetry was passion
passion was genius and he praised movement and invention

I had hardly begun to read
I asked how can you ever be sure
that what you write is really
any good at all and he said you can’t

you can’t you can never be sure
you die without knowing
whether anything you wrote was any good
if you have to be sure don’t write

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/berryman-w-s-merwin/Home for Thanksgivinghttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/home-thanksgiving/W.S. Merwin,W.S. MerwinNov 23, 2010Just before Thanksgiving in 1960, The Nation published W.S. Merwin's poem for the holiday.]]>

I bring myself back from the streets that open like long
Silent laughs, and the others
Spilled into in the way of rivers breaking up, littered with words,
Crossed by cats and that sort of thing,
From the knowing wires and the aimed windows,
Well this is nice, on the third floor, in back of the billboard
Which says Now Improved and I know what they mean,
I thread my way in and I sew myself in like money.

Well this is nice with my shoes moored by the bed
And the lights around the billboard ticking on and off like a beacon,
I have brought myself back like many another crusty
Unbarbered vessel launched with a bottle,
From the bare regions of pure hope where
For a great part of the year it scarcely sets at all,
And from the night skies regularly filled with old movies of my fingers,
Weightless as shadows, groping in the sluices,
And from the visions of veins like arteries, and
From the months of plying
Between can and can, vacant as a pint in the morning,
While my sex grew into the only tree, a joyless evergreen,
And the winds played hell with it at night, coming as they did
Over at least one thousand miles of emptiness,
Thumping as though there were nothing but doors, insisting
"Come out," and of course I would have frozen.

Sunday, a fine day, with my ears wiped and my collar buttoned
I went for a jaunt all the way out and back on
A streetcar and under my hat with the dent settled
In the right place I was thinking maybe—a thought
Which I have noticed many times like a bold rat—
I should have stayed making of those good women
Happy, for a while at least, Vera with
The eau-de-cologne and the small fat dog named Joy,
Gladys with her earrings, cooking and watery arms, the one
With the limp and the fancy sheets, some of them
Are still there I suppose, oh no,

I bring myself back avoiding in silence
Like a ship in a bottle.
I bring my bottle.
Or there was thin Pearl with the invisible hair nets, the wind would not
Have been right for them, they would have had
Their times, rugs, troubles,
They would have wanted curtains, cleanings, answers, they would have
Produced families their own and our own, hen friends and
Other considerations, my fingers sifting
The dark would have turned up other
Poverties, I bring myself
Back like a mother cat transferring her only kitten,
Telling myself secrets through my moustache,
They would have wanted to drink ship, sea, and all or
To break the bottle, well this is nice,
Oh misery, misery, misery,
You fit me from head to foot like a good grade suit of longies
Which I have worn for years and never want to take off.
I did the right thing after all.

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/home-thanksgiving/To the Wires Overheadhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wires-overhead/W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,W.S. MerwinJun 29, 2005This is the year
when the swallows did not come back

you have not noticed

]]>

This is the year
when the swallows did not come back

you have not noticed

now all spring
the evenings’ messages
are no longer passing through
the feet of swallows
lined up in a row
holding you
under the high
strung sparks of their voices

with the notes of that
music changing
as once more they would go
sailing out and once more
singly or in pairs or
several together
across the long light they would
skim low over the gardens
and down the steep pastures
and over the river
and would come back to their places
to go on telling
what was there while it was there

you do not hear
what is missing

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/wires-overhead/To Being Latehttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/being-late/W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,W.S. MerwinJun 29, 2005Again again you are
the right time after all

not according to
however we planned it

]]>

Again again you are
the right time after all

not according to
however we planned it

unforeseen and yet
only too well known
mislaid horizon
where we come to ourselves
as though we had been expected

you are where it appears now
and will stay from now on
in its own good time
it was you we came to
in the first place
hearing voices around us
before we knew what they said

but you always surprise us
it is you that we
hurry to
while you go on waiting
to the end of space

and when we get to you
we stop and listen
trying to hear whether
you are still there

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/being-late/To the Marginhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/margin/W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,W.S. MerwinJun 29, 2005Following the black
footprints the tracks
of words that have passed that way
before me I come
again and again to
your blank shore]]>

Following the black
footprints the tracks
of words that have passed that way
before me I come
again and again to
your blank shore

not the end yet
but there is nothing more
to be seen there
to be read to be followed
to be understood
and each time I turn
back to go on
in the same way
that I draw the next breath

the wider you are
the emptier and the more
innocent of any
signal the more
precious the text
feels to me as I make
my way through it reminding
myself listening
for any sound from you

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/margin/To the Unfinishedhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/unfinished/W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,W.S. MerwinMar 27, 2003Clear eminence without whom I would be
nothing oh great provision never seen
barely acknowledged even wished away]]>

Clear eminence without whom I would be
nothing oh great provision never seen
barely acknowledged even wished away
without thinking

you in whose immeasurable presence
the darkness itself comes to be itself
and light recalls its colors and each sound
comes echoing

your undertone I have forgotten when
I first woke into knowing you were there
before words ever reached me but that time
under your wing

is still with me you have carried it all
the way along with faces that surface
appearing almost as they were before
and with the spring

that returns through its leaves never the same
you have brought me once more to the old house
after all these years of remembering
without knowing

it was you who kept opening the way
offering me what I had to choose it is
you who come bringing me the only day
in the morning

]]>https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/unfinished/Poets Against the Warhttps://www.thenation.com/article/archive/poets-against-war/W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,W.S. Merwin,Alfred Corn,Sam Hamill,W.S. Merwin,Maxine Kumin,Rita DoveFeb 19, 2003Here The Nation presents a few of the works posted on "Poets Against the War," (www.poetsagainstthewar.org), the website set up by Sam Hamill, poet and editor, when he called for poems and statements against war in Iraq.]]>

Here The Nation presents a few of the works posted on "Poets Against the War," (www.poetsagainstthewar.org), the website set up by Sam Hamill, poet and editor, when he called for poems and statements against war in Iraq. At last count, there were 8,200 entries. Hamill’s summons to poets followed Laura Bush’s invitation to a symposium on American poetry at the White House, which was "postponed" when it was learned that antiwar poems were to be presented.

Statement

It would not have been possible for me ever to trust someone who acquired office by the shameful means Mr. Bush and his abettors resorted to in the last presidential election. His nonentity was rapidly becoming more apparent than ever when the catastrophe of September 11, 2001, provided him and his handlers with a role for him, that of "wartime leader," which they, and he in turn, were quick to exploit. This role was used at once to silence all criticism of the man and his words as unpatriotic, and to provide the auspices for a sustained assault upon civil liberties, environmental protections and general welfare. The perpetuation of this role of "wartime leader" is the primary reason–more important even than the greed for oilfields and the wish to blot out his father’s failure–for the present determination to visit war upon Iraq, kill and maim countless people, and antagonize much of the world of which Mr. Bush had not heard until recently. The real iniquities of Saddam Hussein should be recognized, in this context, as the pretexts they are. His earlier atrocities went unmentioned as long as he was an ally of former Republican administrations, which were happy, in their time, to supply him with weapons. I think that someone who was maneuvered into office against the will of the electorate, as Mr. Bush was, should be allowed to make no governmental decisions (including judicial appointments) that might outlast his questionable term, and if the reasons for war were many times greater than they have been said to be I would oppose anything of the kind under such "leadership." To arrange a war in order to be re-elected outdoes even the means employed in the last presidential election. Mr. Bush and his plans are a greater danger to the United States than Saddam Hussein.

W.S. MERWIN

State of the Union, 2003

I have not been to Jerusalem,
but Shirley talks about the bombs.
I have no god, but have seen the children praying
for it to stop. They pray to different gods.
The news is all old news again, repeated
like a bad habit, cheap tobacco, the social lie.

The children have seen so much death
that death means nothing to them now.
They wait in line for bread.
They wait in line for water.
Their eyes are black moons reflecting emptiness.
We’ve seen them a thousand times.

Soon, the President will speak.
He will have something to say about bombs
and freedom and our way of life.
I will turn the TV off. I always do.
Because I can’t bear to look
at the monuments in his eyes.

SAM HAMILL

New Hampshire, February 7, 2003

It’s snowing again.
All day, reruns
of the blizzard of ’78
newscasters vying
for bragging rights
how it was to go hungry
after they’d thumped
the vending machines empty
the weatherman clomping
four miles on snowshoes
to get to his mike
so he could explain
how three lows
could collide to create
a lineup of isobars
footage of state troopers
peering into the caked
windows of cars
backed up for white
miles on the interstate.

Nowhere, reruns
of the bombings in Vietnam
2 million civilians blown
apart, most of them children
under 16, children
always the least
able to dive
for cover when
all that tonnage bursts
from a blind sky.
Snow here is
weighting the pine trees
while we wait for the worst:
for war to begin.
Schools closed, how
the children
love a benign blizzard
a downhill scrimmage
of tubes and sleds. But who
remembers the blizzard
that burst on those other children?
Back then we called it
collateral damage
and will again.

MAXINE KUMIN

Letter to a Fellow Activist

Still, I keep thinking it’s not really fitting
To send a "no thanks" when I wasn’t invited.
And I’m glad I won’t have to be cold to a person
Apparently decent and kind, a reader
Whose outlook poems and fictions have broadened.

Loyal, I think, to this nation, I hereby
Inculpate myself for making slapdash,
Insufficient and tardy efforts to save it
From the brutal, disastrous, avoidable brink
Our misguided Executive and Congress have brought us to.
Demonstrations, petitions, and reasoning seldom
Make an impression on heat-packing chauvinists.
They don’t give a flying…whatever, bent as they
Are on showing the world who’s in charge.

The practice of politics (always beyond belief
Boring) will take care of us if we fail
To take care of it. Despair is suburban,
So we soldier on, casting our ballots for candidates
Who won’t be elected, we write those who were,
We canvass and organize. No, in all honesty
I can’t, at age sixty, pretend I would welcome
Being clubbed or imprisoned; but I do root for those
Nonviolent actions performed in the interest
Of liberty, justice, and peace–for Americans,
Sure, but as well for all people everywhere.
To save the skin of one Arab, Israeli, or Yank
Would I write an obvious poem? You bet I would!
If only it could save. When gauging results
Of our deeds, though, I take an agnostic approach.
Seek justice: The aftermath’s not in our hands.
Since "All wars are boyish," would that all war
Criminals present and future would grow up
And not dream it’s cool or effective to pistol-whip
Erstwhile allies they’ve turned into enemies.
Should one ever resort to violent measures
In the name of a righteous cause? I’d say not.
Aren’t we a global concern, the Blue Planet’s
Symbiotic affiliates? Yes, because no man
Or nation’s an island, entire of itself.
If the bell should toll for Iraq or for Palestine,
It will toll for these States and Israel, too–
For the threatened ideals of fair play and loveliness
Embodied in poems we’re moved to live by.

PFC Corn here, reporting for peace watch.

ALFRED CORN

Umoja: Each One of Us Counts

One went the way of water,
one crumpled under stone;
one climbed the air but plunged through fire,
one fought the fear alone.

Remember us, though we are gone.

A star flares on an epaulet,
a ball rolls in harm’s way;
the glowing line onscreen goes flat,
an anonymous bullet strays–

Remember us! Do not forget!

One lay slathered in garlands,
one left only a smear;
one cracked a joke, smiled, then shrugged
to show he didn’t care.

Do not forget that we were here.

Do those who failed still miss the wind,
that sweet breath from the sky?
Do they still covet rock and moss
or the swift, hard blink of the lizard’s eye?

We walk on water, we are written on air.
Let us honor the lost, the snatched, the relinquished,
those vanquished by glory, muted by shame.
Stand up in the silence they’ve left and listen:
those absent ones, unknown and unnamed–

Ha’iku, Hawaii

very year the blessings of statehood are officially celebrated in Hawaii. There are echoes of Thanksgiving and the Fourth of July in the ceremonies, and the rhetoric often sounds as though it were composed for the benefit of the swirling tourists from the mainland: part of a packaged welcome designed to make them feel at once far away and right at home. But among residents of Hawaii statehood is not universally considered a privilege. Despite the speeches and the presence of tourists and the military, despite the local maneuvers of multinational corporations based heaven knows where, the mainland and the Federal government seem, most of the time, remote and unreal.

The Federal government’s directives regarding Hawaii, thousands of miles from Washington, sometimes add to the sense of remoteness. Last month, for instance, the residents of Maui were startled to learn, from the island newspaper and the radio, that the Department of Agriculture had been working on a plan to “eradicate” from the islands what the planners refer to as the tri-fly. The term refers to three species of fruit fly, of which the best known is the so-called Mediterranean fruit fly. Parts of California were sprayed for this insect up to twenty times in recent years with results that have not been fully publicized.

The new plan proposes spraying all the Hawaiian Islands, over a period of six years, with six poisons, three of them organophosphates, several of them suspected carcinogens and mutagens. Of the organophosphates, the most familiar is malathion, which was used in California and, before that, in Florida. The plan proposes spraying some 2.9 million pounds of malathion on the islands, roughly three pounds for each inhabitant, in a manner that is in open violation of the Federal law quoted on the label that must accompany the product when it is sold in stores.

By the time the residents of Maui heard of the plan, some $200,000, to which their own taxes had contributed, had been spent in drawing up a draft environmental impact statement, which is required before Congress will vote funds for the plan. According to Hampton Carson, a distinguished geneticist from the University of Hawaii, there had been a “scoping session,” which apparently means a preliminary discussion by chosen local representatives of this and that, in January of last year on Oahu. The public remained largely unaware of the program. In mid-December a meeting to discuss it was announced very unobtrusively in the Honolulu papers and drew only a small number of professionals who already knew about the plan—biologists, doctors, medical researchers and a member of the Papaya Administrative Committee. They attacked the proposal as ludicrous, impracticable, impossible, absurdly expensive. Carson spoke of the inappropriateness of spraying in the rugged valleys of the islands and of the devastation it would wreak on the fragile remnants of Hawaii’s ecosystem. Even the spokesman for the papaya industry, which devotes a considerable sum every year to combating the fruit flies, said that he and his industry were not in favor of trying to eradicate the flies “at the expense of the health and welfare of Hawaii’s people.”

o public meetings were scheduled on Kauai, though the plan proposed to start the spraying there. A member of the Maui County Council had persuaded Edward Stubbs of the USDA to come to a pre-Christmas meeting in a lecture room at the community college, where public gatherings are not generally held. Primed by stories about the Honolulu session, a crowd of at least 250 people turned out, only to be told by Richard Doutt, a Federal consultant, that their comments should not address the proposal as such but only the draft environmental impact statement, which most of them had not heard of until that moment and which had been, for all practical purposes, unavailable to the public on Maui. Stubbs prefaced the meeting with a soothing statement that the project was only a “proposal” and did not have any of “the pressure of a pending program,” but few in the room seemed reassured.

In the words of Wayne Gagne, an entomologist from the Bishop Museum, the 330-page draft statement is a sophisticated document, if not a full, adequate or straightforward treatment. In 1962, despite the US chemical industry’s efforts to suppress her book Silent Spring, Rachel Carson gathered enough evidence to enable her to describe the effects of malathion poisoning on the human body: muscular breakdown and the destruction of the sheaths of the sciatic and spinal nerves. And she pointed out that the combination of malathion with other organophosphates—something very possible in our poison-ridden environment—results in massive poisoning “up to fifty times as severe as would be predicted on the basis of adding together the toxicities of the two.” The plan for spraying Hawaii proposes the use of three organophosphates; only the planners seem to believe that they will not combine. It is also known that repeated exposure to these compounds greatly multiplies the health risk. The USDA plan calls for 108 to 156 sprayings, more than five times as many as in California. Although some of the potential dangers are mentioned, reading the draft statement and its calculations is like reading the Navy’s descriptions of radiation levels in water into which it has spilled or dumped radioactive materials. You would think the result was good for you.

The malathion sprayed in California took the paint off cars, and the draft impact statement does allude to the expense of providing new paint jobs. It does not, however adequately discuss the possible contamination of drinking water on the outer islands of the Hawaiian chain, which depend for the most part on runoff and, in many places, on private rain-catchment systems.

The audience at the Maui meeting, which included biologists, medical researchers, doctors, lawyers, economists and farmers, was fervent, well informed, articulate and unanimously opposed to the proposal. The discussion went on until the building had to be closed for the night, and the nature of it was as much of a surprise to Stubbs as the eradication plan had been to the residents of Maui. He said it left him “emotionally exhausted,’’ and he assured the audience that he had got their message.

ews of the proposal came at a time when the subject of pesticides and herbicides was already seething in Hawaii. Ten times as much poison is used in Hawaii per square mile, and three times as much per capita, as in any state on the mainland. In 1981 the Hawaiian pineapple industry was permitted to use the pesticide dibromochloropropane, or DBCP, a carcinogen banned on the mainland by the Environmental Protection Agency in 1979, under a special variance that expired at the beginning of this year. Growers have asked the EPA to allow them to go on using the chemical for two more years, until their stockpiles are depleted. And on three successive days in early January, the Honolulu Star Bulletin reported that residues of heptachlor, DBCP and ethylene dibromide had been discovered in milk and that state officials, consultants from the University of Hawaii and representatives of the pineapple industry had attempted to suppress the facts. This is the context in which the tri-fly eradication proposal emerged into the ken of the people of Maui.

Although Stubbs told the citizens at the meeting that they had until January 16 to send their comments on the impact statement to Washington, he subsequently said that in view of the unforeseen response (which has necessitated printing a new edition of the statement), the deadline has been extended to March 26. But he made that comment in a telephone conversation with a local environmentalist, and skeptics on Maui suggest that once $200,000 have been sunk in a scheme, somebody is going to push to make it go, even though, as the draft statement itself concedes in passing, the proposed spraying program will almost certainly not eradicate the fruit flies, whatever else it may send to extinction. The “somebody” in this case is said to be agribiz interests in the citrus industry in California and Texas and, of course, pesticide manufacturers.

There are economic arguments against the plan as well as medical and environmental ones. Mary Evanson, a member of the executive board of the Maui chapter of the Sierra Club, was rather surprised when Stubbs telephoned her from Maryland on January 4. She says she brought the conversation around to economics, informing him that the State of Hawaii might not be willing to contribute funds for the spraying. (The question of who will pay for it is still not clear.) He told her that the Department of Agriculture had considered that possibility and was prepared to turn to private interests, which he did not name. Evanson told him that the tourist industry might not welcome the spraying program. He said he was not worried. “The tourists,” he said, “don’t need to know.”

P.S. Because of the growing furor, the Hawaii Department of Agriculture recently announced it opposed the U.S.D.A. plan and would fight it in court. In late January, the Oahu supervisor of Hawaii’s pesticide monitoring program testified to a State Senate committee, “Every one of Hawaii’s farmers has misused pesticides.” Said one senator, “Even I am shocked.”